When A Book Blogger Comes To A Crossroads: Learning That Reading Is a Dream

Callie King-Stevens
Aug 18, 2021
3 min read

Running this blog has been so hard for me to start and I eventually found myself at a crossroads deciding whether I wanted to keep going or not.

Meet Callie

Hi, I am the author of this bookish blog.

I have been an avid reader since I was just a toddler and made my mom read me bedtime stories every night. My love for books only grew as I started to read on my own and discovered wonderful books. In fact, I now study English literature and creative writing along with media communication at a university.

How did I get here?

With so many bookworms on the internet, I often feel unqualified to be a book blogger myself. I somehow ended up here though and here's my story of how.

I had to start a blog for a social media class at school on any topic I felt passionate about. I thought about what I was qualified to write about right up to the deadline. I just kept coming back to reading though and every time I thought about it I felt unqualified.

I love to read, but I don't finish a ton of books a year, and I am rarely caught up on what is the latest craze. In fact, I hardly ever read a book unless I have heard about it for years, so I kept telling myself I needed to think of something else.

Eventually when I asked my husband about it and told him my doubts about started a book blog he told me to just go for it. "It's just for a class project. I'm sure you can delete it at the end of the semester if you really hate it," he said.

Well, that was just the push I needed, and so I took the leap and pitched the blog idea to my professor.

What now?

Well, the professor approved the topic and my classmates seemed pretty excited to read it so I started.

For the past few weeks, I have been posting on here weekly following directions from my professor. He made us write a blog introducing what we would write about, create topics, write lists, how-tos, and finally this week to write a story.

Every week I get so stressed about writing for this class and struggle to decide what to write about books that will fit into the blog types he is requiring. This week was probably the hardest. I wasn't sure how to create a story that tied into my pillars well and felt like no one would want to read anything I wrote anyway.

Endings

The only thing I could think of to tell a story about was myself. I figured it might be kind of fun to just write this story. How meta to be required to write a story and just tell the story of struggling to decide what to write about.

This is also the last week of the semester. I could quit my endeavor and decide to completely abandon this blog.

I have found myself at a crossroads similar to the one found in Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken". I am stuck between two options. One is to make this my final blog for this site and abandon the project and the other is to commit to keep going and really make this my own project.

Just like in the poem, I don't know which road is correct, but I do think both roads lead to an end. Either the end of this blog and the project or the end of strict deadlines and blog topic/structure ideas.

Decisions

I have decided I want to stay and finish what I started though because as stressed as I have been about this class and getting everything perfect I have actually loved writing these.

Sharing my thoughts on the thing I have loved for the longest time and writing down words for other people to potentially read is an English major's dream, so why should I take this for granted?

So what?

If you have gotten this far I am sure you are wondering why I would write a post about how I struggled to start this project and felt like quitting. Well, I don't have a very great reason, but I personally always love when internet strangers I follow share vulnerable things. I also love to encourage others to do scary and hard things.

So, I guess that is why I am writing this blog.

I am encouraging you to do the hard things, do the things that scare you, but that you want to try. I am doing something terrifying that gives me major anxiety, but that I am loving. You can do it too! Don't stop yourself from living your dreams.